What’s a privacy problem I am trying to solve?

The combined daily trading volume on Ethereum based DEXs is around $10M. 100% of these trades happen on chain. That’s a lot of activity that can be tracked. Many users link their main wallets, which exacerbates the problem. Anyone can see who trades what, how often, and how much. These are exposed:

What is the solution ?

The solution is quite simple - privacy for DeFi. For all of your crypto activity. Starting with holding crypto assets (the Incognito Wallet), now trading (pKyber), and later, lending and borrowing (pCompound – stay tuned!).

Which solutions do people resort to because this doesn’t exist yet?

There has not been any alternative solution for this yet, and we intend to make the first move.

Who are you?

I’m Henry, a growth team member, with the support of other key members across departments, I’m determined to deliver the KPI. You can track my past efforts to acquire users for Incognito.

@duc & @tien plan to launch pKyber in the middle of this month (April). This will allow our users to make confidential trades while utilizing the liquidity of all Uniswap pools.

I will lead the growth campaign for pKyber, with business development support from @elena.

Why do you care?

DeFi has become one of the critical growth areas for Ethereum since 2019, and the solution for privacy is yet to be found. With the technical advantage from the amazing engineer team working on this, I aim to bring pDeFi to the crypto world, with pKyber as the opening shot.

What’s your schedule & KPI?

Ship Date

Deliverable

April 10th

Finished QC testing

April 17th

Deploy testnet & submit new app update

April 24th

Get 100 unique users try out the testnet

April 30th

Reach 250 unique users try out pKyber testnet and score 75 on NPS (Users’ willingness to recommend the feature to a friend, on the scale of 0 to 100.)

Note: Unique users is the amount of individual traders on unique user IDs who trade on pKyber over a particular period of time. (anyone who trade in pKyber in any amount, whether they are old or new users, counted by device ID, is an unique trader)

Sorry @henry, we won’t be able to fund your proposal yet. Here are some feedbacks:

If the goal is to get as many quality traders as possible to try the app and give feedback, then yeah. but i’m unsure about the steps to get there (mini games etc), and i think the timeline is optimistic.

NPS score 50 is too low. We should aim for 70-80 at least.

NPS score is not a good metric for a 1-week-launched product. and considering the natures of trading, repeated rate/number of trades/trader would make more sense.

Clearer definition of “traders”? Does any trader who trades any amount of coin (maybe equivalent to $1) count?

How much should we set for the total value of trading volume from those 250 unique traders?

the fist task in todo is to build a landing page for people to sign up for the app. does this mean that all 250 unique traders will be new app users as well?

1/ The goal is to get quality traders to try out the feature. The minigame is just to encourage people to try out feature and ask great questions. They don’t get airdopped by trading, they get it by asking good questions in AMA.
2/ My target score was set on the range between -100 to +100. If we set on the scale from 0 to 100, my target score would be 75.
3/ If NPS is not a good enough metric, we can consider collecting quality feedbacks from users to improve the product and re-launch again. Actually I think we should not use NPS here at all, the purpose of launching and getting feedback is to improve, if the score is high already, what else should we improve?. Repeated number of trade would make sense over the long period, not in a 2-week period.
4/ As I mentioned in the proposal, unique trader is anyone who conduct a trade in pUniswap, whether they are old or new users, counted by device ID.
5/ Like I mentioned above, volume of trading does not make sense at all since we focus on improving the product this month, not shooting it to the moon.
6/ 250 unique traders will include of both old and new traders.

Unexpected update from the chain team: Because we are moving more than $2 million to the new smart contract, that is a lot of money and it would be best to figure out how to prevent security flaws/attacks of these contracts right from testnet stage (instead of moving things to mainnet in a hurry and getting hacked).

Therefore we decided to postpone the launch this week to the first week of May.

@henry thanks for the update. while i think the decision to delay the launch is valid, i would suggest let’s not delay the launch. let’s launch as scheduled – we just need to make a small modification in the launch plan. here is why.

this ethereum trustless bridge v2 (handling both assets and contracts) is not written from scratch. it’s built on top of the ethereum trustless bridge v1 (handling just assets). the ethereum trustless bridge v1 is battle-tested since november 2019.

for the mainnet launch – i do agree that taking extra time to do code review, do more tests, and possibly do a 3rd party code audit. so a delay to first week of may for mainnet launch is absolutely reasonable.

but, i think you guys should launch the testnet version of pDeFi as scheduled.

deploying the ethereum smart contacts on one of the ethereum testnets such as kovan, rinkeby, and ropsten

deploying the incognito smart contracts on the incognito testnet or devnet

deploying the feature into the app, probably in the home screen, but label it clearly in the “pDeFi papp” icon and copy and that this is a testnet version

how would “launching it as scheduled as a testnet” help us?

we can publish on ethresear.ch and ask the ethereum communities to try out pDeFi, give us feedback, and possibly review the smart contract code. our post on bridge v1 on ethresearch has got over 2.4k views on ethereum research.

our current users can try out pDeFi and give us early feedback – now – so that we can make pDeFi perfect by the time we switch from testnet to mainnet in May.

we can work with 20+ ERC20 partners who have already gone incognito to test their tokens in pDeFi on the testnet prior to the mainnet launch.

i think we can achieve so much by launching it as scheduled – even though just as a testnet – to collect valuable feedback from a lot of people and iterate on the product from now till May.

This week, thanks to the relentless efforts of the team @tien@elena@duc, we managed to launch the pUniswap Testnet on schedule, 17th April. Though there was an unexpected smart contract security issue, we will push the mainnet version live in May.

In terms of promotion, so far we got:

Cross promotions: BNT, CEL, REN, GNT, OGN. (3 new projects onboard)

Influencers: 4 (1 new this week)

Media: 1.

This week launching will be lowkey in our community via homepage banner, popup in app, email blast & social media & telegram. We we expect to see some first traders by the end of this week.

Besides, for current Incognito users, pKyber testnet does not give them a strong enough motivation to try out, because of the similar flow with the current pDEX & the abnormal exchange rate does not indicate that they will get a market rate by trading via pKyber.

Therefore, instead of spending more time fine-tuning a temporary product that will last for 2 weeks only, we’d rather spend time making the new UX for pKyber mainnet, removing deposit & withdraw steps.

Next week:

We are all aware that in April, for security reasons, we could not push the pKyber mainnet live on schedule. The new launch date will be on May 13th, so if we stick to April KPI, there is yet a product for users to use. Therefore I am proposing a new metrics for April which I believe is a crucial to the mainnet launch of pKyber in May.

Product, instead of launching the testnet version, we will:

Focus on making the UX much better than it currently is. Specifically, we are going to allow users to trade directly from their wallet.

Temporarily remove pKyber testnet & will show pKyber again when mainnet is live.

Growth, instead of getting 250 traders, we will:

Increase cross-promotions target: Target to achieve 15 cross-promotion partnerships by the end of April & 20 total by launch date. (At least 5 AMA confirmed for the launch date 13th May).

Increase influencers target: 8 total by the end of April, and 12 influencers by launch date.

@hoang recently joined Incognito’s interoperability team to help build cool stuff. Previously, @hoang worked for one of the biggest e-commerce systems in Vietnam called Tiki. He has had experiences with the popular programming languages as well as messaging systems like Kafka in a microservices architecture. He’s strongly interested in building scalable and reliable systems with low latency APIs. On a less serious note, as a human, he’d love to sleep well at night by building monitoring systems apart from the main system.

Thanks for the update. It seems like you have put a lot of thoughts into the plan. That’s awesome.

For the product side, I will let @zon and @duy pour their thoughts in. On the growth side, I just have several comments:

I’m not very clear on the current results. Is this the team got 5 partnerships and 5 influencers who will post/promote the product at the launching date? Or they’re doing the promotion now? If they’re doing works now, could we measure if they drive any traffics/users?

It seems to me that the initial goals of growth (the number of influencers, cross-promotions…) are several steps too far away from the final goal (100k trading volume). Are there any other ways to measure the pre-launch performance better? Something like the number of pKyber waiting users (equal to subscribers/waiting list in e-commerce or Kickstarter projects) will give us more control over our works. Just note that the closer those initial targets are from our final goals, the less we have to depend on lucks to make the final goals happen.

There are 3 main activities including cross-promotion, influencers, and media. could you paint a picture of how each of those activities could drive to your final goals? So when the month ends, we can measure whether our initial assumptions are correct, get better sense for next plans and know exactly which activities we need to invest more (high ROI). I would suggest doing a simple spreadsheet that depicts both users’ journey and numbers. I draw a simple math with dummy steps and no. below for your reference, feel free to make it your own way.

1/ We are on-boarding more and more projects & influencers to try out the feature & share in their community on the mainnet launch date. It’s similar to acquiring early bird signup emails, but on a larger scales, project signups.

2/ With the new approach, pre-launch campaign in April will be measured by the amount of “early-birds” projects sign up for the pKyber launch.

3/ One thing about crypto project is that the tracking traffic it doesn’t work like e-commerce. Crypto community loves organic conversation rather than a salesy pitch & tracking URL. Most people share and talk about projects in telegram and that’s why most of our traffic to Incognito.org is organic.

Therefore the KPI till launch date will be getting as many “early-bird” projects/influencers on-board as possible.

As for media, once the articles about pDeFi is live, we will share the article in DeFi, Kyber and other related groups on Telegram, whenever there are people talking about privacy issue (or we can create a few accounts and raise questions in there).

4/ Cross promotions obviously do not work well if we just do a simple post and stop there.

What we aim to do here with cross promotion is that we do not only post on Twitter and ask them re-tweet, but we also aim at going further in terms of community discussion on telegram, organizing events, AMA, that’s where we convert.

5/ I’m going after projects that have high need of privacy, like Melon project, which is an asset management protocol based on smart contract. Since Zero Knowlege Proof (ZPK) is hard to implement and anyone can see fund managers trading activities, there is a huge value loss to be found. It’s projects like these that convert the most (trading volume from 1-2 fund managers only would help reach the KPI of May already).

Besides, the team is also prioritizing going after the top trading pairs on Kyber in terms of trading volume.

1, 2. What I meant by signups is that people who potentially become traders rather than other third parties that we need to depend on to make our goals happen. They’re nice to have, not the final one who decides whether our efforts work or not. because we dont know exactly what kind of performance those third parties will drive us, this is a bit risky to measure pre-launch goals based on project signups.
3.
3.a i think i probably explained my point wrong. sorry for that. we dont have to implement trạcking url to track our customers, if traffic is from telegram/twitter/other SM channels, it will still be reflected on GA. there might be some drop along the way but it would be many. If most of your traffic is organic or direct, you would need to investigate what might be wrong. to sum up, what i meant is that you have assumption for the performance of each channel would bring you, and then measure the actual results against those assumption. You already did an awesome job showing the journey though.
3.b if mostly of your traffic comes from organic, would be great if you could pull the sheet of organic keywords that people found you from. that will help to know which efforts are contributing to traffic.
3.c you’ve done a great job painting that journey just need to consider the number of value gained from influencers and media are significantly lower than other channels. especially, it doesnt make sense to gain only 3 traders from 8 influencers(?). if so, would be wise to shift your effort to focus on tasks that bring high value.
2. 4.5. got them. amazing.

Re: Thank you for the feedback, I believe it’s very helpful. Here are some responses from me.

1, 2. I see your point, and it makes sense. The reason I took the risk of going after the “nice to have” projects is that they help the conversion rate better when we reach out to their community. A guest recommended by the teacher will be more welcomed by the students than a guest unfamiliar to neither the teacher nor the students.3a. Noted, you are right, there are traffic from other channels like telegram and other SM channels as well. Will make sure to measure on the launch date.3b. Agree.3c. Shifting efforts to the best performing channels is always the right thing to do. However, there’s a thing about crypto is that the industry is still young and we can not be sure 100% what works and what does not. Therefore with every new campaign launching, I prefer to use the experimental approach, and focus on the best-performing channel. As for the influencers, with the calculation I might get 3 traders from them (worst case), but at first we’d definitely get 8 of them try out the product (8 traders), which is not bad.